I did a thing!

I am a little bit terrified to use this as a blog title. But, as I don't make any money at all from the thousands of hours I spend blogging, I figure I have not much to lose.

To that end, I will leave Jeremy Clarkson and Australian Youtuber Alex Apollonov to fight it out over who first coined the phrase "I did a thing" and who actually has the right to use it.

Read about the stoush here. Oh.... and here.

Whatever the case, I did a thing!

When a garage looks like this, two assumptions are almost immediately made:

1) The person who owns these bikes, quite clearly, enjoys riding; and

2) The person who owns these bikes should have the veterinary skills to keep this pack on track.

Well, I can tick "Check Box 1", but when it comes to "Check Box 2" the ink bowl ran dry many years ago.

I don't have the mechanical nous to balance my flat-slides, nor do I have the comprehension to calculate suspension compression. But that's OK; a lot of bike riders wouldn't. And, let's face it, there are plenty of little men in the back of motorbike shops that can do that sort of thing far more effectively than you or I.

However, I am a little ashamed to admit that I am not willing to take the time or make the effort to do the simplest of tasks, such as bleeding brakes and changing oils and filters. This is a terrible admission for someone who owns as many bikes as I do!

How, or why, is this the case you ask?

This bike gave me the least trouble when it was nothing more than a memory

I attribute my mechanical ineptitude to my 1987 GSXR 1100G.

A weapon of a bike that never looked as good to me as the day it was sliding on its side into an Armco barrier on James Street in Guildford.

That bike was a travesty; a diabolical misrepresentation of all that we enjoy about motorcycles, and it left me scarred.

It was such a piece of crap that every time I put a spanner on it to fix one thing, another thing would break, fall off or cease to function. In the first three months of ownership the bike went back to the dealer more than 9 times to fix the same problem: a leaking oil cooler. I would drop it off at the dealer, pick it up 'fixed' and by the time I got home I would turn around and head back to the dealer to drop it off again to be 'fixed' .......again.

The fairings had so many hairline cracks that I'm certain the only thing holding it together was the paint work. Every time I pulled the fairing off to service something it would literally crumble in my hands like Filo pastry.

So, when I threw it down the road, I quite clearly remember thinking "I am really glad this thing is insured". I hated it and I was glad to see it gone.

Since then, I have had zero desire to put a spanner to a bike for even the simplest of servicing tasks.

I am not kidding when I tell you that for the past 9 months, in an attempt to keep the motor running true and the battery adequately charged, I have been lapping the block on my delectable '89 Gixer with no front brakes at all! None.

Why? Because I've become so estranged from motorcycle maintenance it is nearly terminal: and I am not speaking metaphorically.

The last time I took it out for a run, I slid into the middle of an intersection with the back brake locked up. No front brakes on a GSXR is not a good thing when, due to the low set bars, the front loads so heavily on deceleration. Stopping becomes a very protracted process.

Immediately after that sphincter tightening moment, I decided it was time to park the bike up and re-learn how to bleed brakes. As I couldn't or did not want to trailer the bike to a bike shop (I don't trust anyone with this bike) I put my big boy overalls on and got stuck into it.

If your arms don't extend like Inspector Gadget's do, don't bother trying to do this job alone.

I went to Repco and, for $17.99, I got a brake bleed kit. It says it is a "one man brake bleeder" but unless you are as appendagely distended as the blue bloke in Avatar, there is no way you are doing a bike with twin disc brakes on your own. I was lucky. I found a friend. If you don't have any, you should get the vacuum pump tool for $139,00.

It was the fear of doing more harm than good: that was what I had to get past.

The amount of air that came out of the lines was a little disturbing. I started on the caliper on the brake side; made sure this was flowing full and true. Then I moved to the other side to bleed out the remaining air. Then I built the pressure back up through the painful process of lever compression and working the bleeder valve.

It was fiddly, but it was far from difficult.

I was worried that the master cylinder may have failed due to age and lack of use. But the Suzuki never fails to astound me with its mechanical resilience. It was a bleed and fluid replacement only.

Getting this bad girl to pull up like she is meant to took all of about one hour of fiddling on the levers and nipples. Title of my sex tape?

So, there you go: I did a thing! And it is great to see this beast back on the street again.

All good street bikes deserve to be let out to play in the sunshine.